Wooden Spice Racks
Buy the best wooden spice racks selected and recommended by interior designers. By Tara Gosselin.
Endlessly looking for where you’ve placed a certain spice jar for the nth time can definitely take the fun out of cooking. A wooden spice rack organizes your condiments, spices, and bottles in one place so you can focus on the most important task. And with their warm natural stain and open design, they give your pantry a clean, clutter-free, and custom look. Whether you want it on the counter or mounted on the wall, here are our experts’ top picks.
Wooden Spice Racks
Buying Guide
Tara Gosselin
Interior Design Expert
Tara is a San Antonio-based award-winning landscape architect, writer and educator, passionate about eco-friendly solutions and growing her own food. She knows all it takes to help you create a sustainable backyard retreat that combines blissful charm with a modern take on landscaping.
One of the best ways to store spices is a wood wall spice rack. This is the perfect solution for stylishly storing your spices in plain sight, especially when you’re tight on cupboard space.
A rack that makes all your spices easily visible can save you time and energy in the kitchen when you’re hunting for ingredients while cooking. By organizing your spices where they’re accessible, and the labels are readable, you can avoid undue frustration and speed up your cooking or baking process.
A wooden wall spice rack is an aesthetically pleasing organization system that can be incorporated into a rustic home with a cottage or farmhouse style. To modernize it, choose a darker, sophisticated wood finish, or try DIY painting the wooden rack in matte white or gray.
Use matching jars with labels on the front and the lid. Depending on where your spice rack is mounted, you may need to opt for dark glass jars as some spices and herbs lose their flavor when exposed to sunlight.
Ground spices tend to reduce in intensity, so where possible, store whole spices, such as peppercorns, cinnamon sticks, and nutmeg, and grind them as needed.
When you’re putting together a wood wall spice rack, stock it with basic spices that will allow you to create dishes you’ll enjoy eating. Pepper, salt, sea salt, rosemary, garlic, and oregano are staple spices that will help you build many different types of dishes.
If you enjoy cuisines from around the world, it might be a good idea to stock your spice rack with selections such as turmeric, cumin, mustard, marjoram, dill, cinnamon, and more. We always like stocking cocoa as well to add earthiness to dishes or to brew a delicious hot beverage on its own.
Wall spice racks are not necessarily better than freestanding ones. Each type of spice rack comes with pros and cons. Wall racks are typically screwed into a wall or other surface while free-standing ones sit on the countertop or other suitable kitchen space.
Wall spice racks are a good choice in kitchens that do not have much space to spare in their drawers and cabinets, or on countertops. You can not only mount them on a wall but the inside of kitchen cabinet doors too.
On the downside, wall spice racks must be installed. This is not just time-consuming but could cost you if you have to hire a contractor to do it. Also, wall racks are difficult to move once they have been fixed in their position.
Free standing spice racks come in diverse sizes, shapes and materials. They are not restricted by space to the same degree as wall racks. You can move them with ease as and when you need to.
The main disadvantage is they may not work in small kitchens that do not have the adequate counter space. Free standing racks sometimes come with their own jars and might not fit your existing containers. In that case, you would have to transfer your flours, grains and other kitchen materials to the rack’s jars.